"Ungraceful, Repulsive, Difficult to Comprehend": Sociolinguistic Consideration of Shifts in Signed Languages

Abstract

Concern may be warranted for the long-term prospects of signed languages in contact with neighboring languages. Although signed languages do not display the usual characteristic of endangered languages, they are used by a diminishing community that is continually undergoing changes. Potentially destructive factors include language shift or language attrition stemming partly from adverse sociolinguistic conditions such as stigmatized identity. The death or corruption of signed languages, with their intricate relationships between vision, gestures, signs, & thought, would be a particular loss to the global linguistic community. As signed languages are characterized by more fundamental form-meaning correspondences than are spoken languages, their logic & integrity could easily be compromised by their devisualization. Whereas a traditional, nonprescriptivist linguistic approach would encourage scholars toward dispassionate neutrality, some intervention, at least in the form of raising awareness of the process & consequences of language change, is deemed appropriate. 100 References. L. R. Hunter